50 Years After Dalai Lama’s Flight, Future Looks Bleak for Tibet

A full half-century after the Dalai Lama left his home for India, the prognosis for Tibet doesn’t seem too encouraging.

The Dalai Lama himself has alleged that the Chinese are not being serious about negotiations and has hardened his rhetoric, accusing China of making Tibet a “hell on earth” and of viewing Tibetans as “criminals deserving to be put to death.” The Chinese authorities, on their part, seem wedded to their often-hilarious rhetoric that portrays the Dalai Lama as a “splittist” and as a “jackal clad in Buddhist monk’s robes” who wants to break up China.

But the Dalai Lama has time and again insisted over the past many years that the Tibetans want just “meaningful autonomy,” not full independence.

“Autonomy is provided for in the Chinese constitution for minorities and special rights are guaranteed for Tibet,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2005 in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in India. “Let’s consider Tibet historically: Different language, different culture, different geographical location. So in order to get maximum satisfaction for the Tibetan people, I think a higher degree of autonomy should be given. Then Tibetan loyalty to the people of China will naturally come.”

Even that may be too much to ask from the Chinese dictatorship. The model for the Chinese governance of Tibet that was cited to me by Jigmey Tsultrim, my escort in Dharamsala, was Hong Kong. But even there, in spite of Chinese assurances given to the British before and during the 1997 handover, things are uncertain on the civil liberties front.

“Ten years on, concerns remain over threats to freedom of assembly posed by restrictive provisions of the Public Order Ordinance, as well as excessive and disproportionate use of force by the police, particularly during public demonstrations or protests in Hong Kong,” states an Amnesty International report. “The right to freedom of expression is highly valued by the people of Hong Kong, yet this fundamental right has also been threatened. A lack of clarity on Hong Kong’s relationship with the rest of China under ‘one country, two systems’ has also fueled concerns for the protection of the human rights in Hong Kong.”

And Tibet doesn’t have the protection of having been an island ruled by a foreign power able to negotiate some basic rights for the region. Unless there is a change in the fundamental nature of the Chinese dictatorship, Tibet will quite certainly languish in its current state.

Now, Tibet and its leadership shouldn’t be idealized either. In spite of Western attempts to romanticize Tibet (Orville Schell’s “Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood” provides an overview), the region was a feudal theocracy with abysmal living standards for much of the Tibetan population till the Chinese invasion. Serfdom was rampant, with monasteries often holding numerous serfs in bondage. Certainly, the current Dalai Lama was trying to reform all of this, even at his young age. But Chinese rule has meant considerable material progress for the Tibetan people (as even the Dalai Lama acknowledged to me), albeit at tremendous cost otherwise, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s Red Guards subjected the Tibetans to many atrocities, and the number of monasteries in Tibet was reduced from 6,000 to barely a few hundred.

“For Tibet, the Cultural Revolution was catastrophic,” write John Roberts and Elizabeth Roberts in “Freeing Tibet.” “Mao’s belief that religion is poison combined with the admonition to ‘destroy the four olds’ gave the Red Guards license to wage war against the physical manifestations of Tibetan civilization—the monasteries, the artworks, the libraries—as well as the very ways of the people and their Buddhist beliefs.”

As amazing as the Dalai Lama is in person, there are several shortcomings to the approach he’s taken in exile, as writer Patrick French has pointed out. First, in spite of claiming to be a follower of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama seem to have understood the notion of Gandhi’s “passive resistance” very differently from Gandhi himself, interpreting it literally, instead of urging Tibetans to engage in massive civil disobedience. (Gandhi actually hated the term “passive resistance,” preferring instead the almost untranslatable satyagraha to describe his approach.) Second, the Dalai Lama has included the Tibetan-populated regions outside Tibet proper in his definition of Tibet and has let the West-based Tibet lobby often set the agenda, hence minimizing the chances of a compromise with the Chinese regime.

Nor is resorting to violence the answer for Tibetans. With the assistance of the CIA, there was a Tibetan guerrilla movement in the 1950s and the 1960s that made little headway. (Mikel Dunham’s “Buddha’s Warriors: The Story of the CIA-Backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet” provides an account of that fiasco.) And, more recently, when Tibetans made Chinese residents in Tibet last year the subject of their wrath, this gave the Beijing regime an excuse to engage in a massive crackdown.

To read the Dalai Lama’s account in his autobiography of his departure from Tibet is very moving.

“After bidding [many of my companions] a tearful farewell, I was helped on to the broad back of a dzomo[a Tibetan yak-cattle hybrid], for I was still too ill to ride a horse,” writes the Dalai Lama in “Freedom in Exile.” “And it was on this humble form of transport that I left my native land.”

Sadly, it doesn’t seem too likely that the Dalai Lama will ever be able to step foot in his homeland again.